January 1, 2005

CiF Draft

For the second time in 15 months, Venezuelans head to the polls on Sunday to vote on ending presidential term limits, potentially allowing Hugo Chávez to remain in power for life. The idea was already defeated in 2007, but El Comandante is graciously giving the people a second chance to get the answer right.

In effect, Chávez has turned the Venezuelan state itself into an appendage of the Si campaign.

The use of state resources for party political purposes is both illegal and unconstitutional in Venezuela. But with die-hard Chávez loyalists installed in every key post in the state - and, notably, throughout the court system - no institution is able to check these abuses. The collapse of the separation of powers leaves the government with a free hand to flout legal and constitutional norms that, ironically, chavistas themselves drafted less than a decade ago.

The government campaign is centered on a simple message: Voting "Si" does not mean making Chávez president for life. It means giving the people the chance to re-elect him as many times as they want. The proposal would expand people's political rights, they say, by removing an arbitrary restriction on their choice of candidates. Voters will always get the final say, through free and fair elections.

It's an argument that refutes itself. The massive abuse of state resources we've already seen tells us all we need to know about how fair those future elections would be. In addition to the natural advantages of incumbency, Chávez's perpetual re-election bids would be able to leverage all the resources at the disposal of the overwhelmingly dominant power-center in Venezuelan society today: the petrostate itself.

Where there are no checks on the abuse of state resources for partisan advantage, elections can't be fair. And where elections are not fair, their results can't be democratic.